Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Mystery Update - Lingua Latina

I want to report an update to the mystery of how Pierre Frazier relates to our family (see previous post), but first I need to comment on an additional "complication" which I had known about from my previous research in old German records but had since forgotten about. And that is this: some old church records, especially the farther you go back in time, and especially if they were Catholic, WERE WRITTEN IN LATIN! So just when you can deal with:
  1. another language using words and/or abbreviations that may or may not exist any more, and
  2. old script handwriting which can be incredibly difficult to read because
    • some/most letters of the alphabet were not written then as they might be today
    • the writer was simply messy with a quill pen
    • the photographer either didn't focus or overexposed the microfilm
    • the paper these records were written on is simply disintegrating after 300+ years of elemental exposure, never mind a long and violent history of wars on the European continent.
So why should I complain when the old European records I'm researching suddenly start showing up in a dead language? Researching in this day and age is a miracle any way, so no complaints!

Even with the adjustments for reading difficulties, I was still coming up empty when I again decided to hunt around the French google results and found this website. This site does apparently charge money to view specific results, but when searching the surname DELLE, the limited search results listed a year of birth, marriage, or death, which is at least something to go on! So I started looking for DELLE male names who were born close to the time of Jeanne D'Elle who married Pierre Frazier. Given that Jeanne was born around 1662, there were three possibilities:
  • Pierre D'Elle, born 1663, but he was born to Jean D'Elle and Catharine Blonde (LaBlonde). According to the index, this couple married in 1660.
  • Nicolas D'Elle, born 1655.
  • Jean D'Elle, born 1659. 
Once I finally realized that the names being recorded in the records were ALSO Latinized, and thanks to this website which helped me realize that I was looking for the Latin names of "Nicolai" for Nicolas and "Joannis" for Jean, I started searching the church records of SaĆ¢cy-sur-Marne, and finally came upon the baptism records for both Nicolas and Jean, both children of Nicolas D'Elle and Nicole Candas, who are magically also the parents of Jeanne D'Elle who married Pierre Frazier. So now we have found not one, but two brothers of Jeanne D'Elle, one of whom could be the father of our Jeanne who married Jean Coquigne.

The problem is that we don't know if there were other sons in the Nicolas/Nicole D'Elle family, which there likely could have been. Of the two sons we now know about, they both would have been very young to have been the father of our Jeanne D'Elle who was born around 1675, which is itself still an open issue since I have yet to locate Jeanne's actual birth or marriage record.  Research goes on!

So I post here the clues found to date. As always, please feel free to contact me with any feedback.

No comments:

Post a Comment